A Biography of Louis Braille

Have you ever thought of what it might be like if you couldn’t see? How would your day-to-day activities change and how you communicate with others differ? How we share with others plays a vital role in our everyday life. Louis Braille was a man that changed the way people who were blind communicated with others. He had an exciting childhood when he became blind due to an accident that occurred. Louis Braille changed mass communication for people who were blind and impacted the world with his invention of the Braille system.

Louis Braille was born on January 4th, 1809 in Coupvray, France. His mother was Monique Braille and his father, Simon-Rene Braille and he has three siblings. His father was a village saddler who designed, rebuilt, manufactured, and repaired various saddlery. His father had a workshop that Louis spent a great deal of time playing in. One day when Louis was three, he was playing with an awl and accidentally stabbed his eye.

When Louis Braille was 13, he began to work night and day to develop a new form of writing and make it easier and more efficient for himself and others who were blind. Louis worked on this new system for two years and when he was 15 he created a unique code that was faster to read and less difficult to learn. Louis took his two early influences of this form of writing and combined their best qualities. His new form of writing would use a system of dots which could be formed into multiple patterns to form letters, conjunctions, and contractions. Braille, as it would become known, took Barbier’s dots and turned them into louis braille’s father, Monique Braille’s saddle making creating a very rough version of Braille over time it got adapted to other languages as well.

One day in 1850 Luis was feeling very sick. A year later he knew he was dying. He gave most of his belongings to his friend Coltat who gave them to the students that loved. Louis gave the rest of his belongings to his mother, he also rode the same road home that he traveled to paris with is dad. Louis braille died on January sixth 1852 he was 43 and died of tuberculosis.Tuberculosis is a disease that affects the lungs. He was buried at coupvray.